As Electronic Arts marches toward a post-John Riccitiello future, I've seen a lot of commentary on where the company may be headed, or the legacy he might leave behind. But let's think about how the company arrived where it is today.
Riccitiello, a giant among game industry executives, has been the target of criticism from both investors and vocal video game fans pretty much from day one. But despite the criticism, he was always trying to lead the company in the direction the industry is inevitably headed: digital and online. The problem with Riccitiello's EA, however, has been that the execution never quite lived up to his grand online vision.
And for all the effort and investment Riccitiello committed to staying ahead of the industry curve, the industry hasn't seemed to want to take EA with it.
Here's a refresher on Riccitiello: He joined EA in 1997, serving as president and COO until he left in 2004. After that, he co-founded venture capital firm Elevation Partners alongside investors including Bono from the band U2. There, he was the mastermind behind a merger that created the largest independent game company in the world: BioWare Pandemic. He would eventually bring that entity with him to EA after he rejoined the company in 2007 as CEO.
A new world for an Old Republic
We can start right there. One of the main reasons -- or perhaps the main reason -- that EA negotiated the $860 million deal for BioWare Pandemic was for a Star Wars MMO that was in development at BioWare. In the mid-2000s, we were seeing subscription-based World of Warcraft as an unstoppable online juggernaut, and the very idea of a Star Wars MMO, developed by peerless BioWare, had more than a few people whispering "WoW-killer."
The deal cost an enormous sum of money, but hey, BioWare and Star Wars. What could go wrong? On paper, at the time, this seemed sure-fire, and many onlookers agreed. To Riccitiello, known already for his vision of an online world of video games, it made perfect sense.
All of a sudden, in October 2007, EA was poised to become a major player in the MMO market, and go toe-to-toe with Blizzard. We'd see that Blizzard was forging a relationship with Activision in a deal that would be announced just two months later.
Notice the difference in strategies in this case: EA's plan to make a more meaningful entry into the MMO market was a big expensive acquisition of a Star Wars MMO that was under development by a premier developer. On paper, it seems like an eventual win. Activision's move into the space was through the formation of a holding company that would bring the world's biggest, most successful currently-operating MMO under its umbrella. In practice, it's already a win.
We've seen what has happened to Star Wars: The Old Republic. By the time it released in 2011, the industry had changed so drastically that what seemed like a sure-fire win in the mid-2000s turned out to be the biggest game industry risk to date. The game was a day late and a dollar short, and as subscriptions dwindled, layoffs ensued, and the game went free-to-play.
Again, Riccitiello typically seemed to have the foresight to know where the game industry was heading, but the actual execution seemed to fall short or come just a little bit late.
"Three years out"
In 2009, Facebook games were taking off (particularly FarmVille), so EA's $400 million acquisition of successful Pet Society developer Playfish, on paper, made total sense. But Playfish's The Sims Social -- another product that seemed like a sure thing at the time -- failed to gain the traction needed to knock Zynga off the top of the charts, two years after the FarmVille craze kicked off. Now, social games are in a state of upheaval, with EA losing ground not only to Zynga, but to companies with names like King and Wooga.
In the summer of last year, Riccitiello praised Playfish for helping establish a digital culture and vision for the new EA, but said the company was "three years out" from realizing the full potential of the Playfish acquisition. 2015 may as well be an eternity from now.
And now we're seeing browser-based social games turn increasingly to mobile. Once again, with mobile, EA is getting its sizable foot in the door through acquisitions. Chillingo, the original Angry Birds publisher, was reportedly purchased for under $20 million, and Real Racing developer Firement was acquired for an undisclosed sum.
PopCap was the big buy in this area at $750 million in 2011, plus earn-outs that would bring the total price to $1.3 billion. A highly-respected company with great talent and properties, the PopCap deal -- again -- was expensive, but possibly worth it. But when PopCap said it was laying off workers last year, even that seemingly peerless deal was somewhat sullied.
EA's mobile business does seem to be picking up traction, however, a fact that EA executives like to note when they announce layoffs and when they resign.
Of course, there were other missteps, such as the ongoing SimCity fiasco (another online-centric problem), NBA Live's collapse, Medal of Honor's implosion, and a botched attempt at a Take-Two takeover. There were billions of dollars of spent on acquisitions, hundreds of millions spent on restructuring, missed financial targets and share prices that have slid over 60 percent (while Nasdaq went up). Now we find ourselves here.
Diving in headfirst
It's important to look again at what EA's competitors are doing right now. Riccitiello's EA jumped headfirst into MMOs, social and mobile, while EA's competitors have taken a much more measured, wait-and-see approach.
Look at Activision and Ubisoft. While both are certainly committed to the digital future, compared to EA, they're treading carefully on emerging platforms. We didn't see enormous social, mobile or MMO acquisitions from these companies--rather measured, organic entry into those sectors. (Remember when Ubisoft was toying with a Tom Clancy MMORPG? Probably good for the company that that never came to fruition.)
When everyone said retail was dying, Activision came out with Skylanders, a video game-toy crossover that was completely reliant on physical retail. Ubisoft continues to focus on the console and PC game crowds with top-tier franchises like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. These companies are every bit as monolithic as EA, but they're playing to their internal strengths.
I remember talking to former Activision CFO Thomas Tippl and (separately) Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot a few years ago, amid EA's increasingly aggressive moves into digital. The wait-and-see, organic growth approach was very much a conscious decision on both companies' parts. They'd rather watch Riccitiello and EA take the gamble.
So with every acquisition into the online and mobile space, EA traded a few huge competitors like Activision and Ubisoft for a thousand smaller ones that are scrappy, agile and hungry for success. Next thing you know, you're a lumbering giant fighting a multi-front war that's really difficult to win.
Convulsions
Riccitiello was typically looking in the right direction, moving where the industry was headed. I disagree with the notion that EA was slow in identifying where the market was headed--if anything it tripped up while racing toward a vision, and fell short in the execution. This just might be one symptom of being a big publisher in today's dynamic industry -- this is what it looks like when such a large company convulses as it tries to react to disruption.
The future of video games is, per usual, uncertain. Smartphones are varied and ubiquitous, PC is elbowing its way into the living room, social games are in upheaval, cloud computing is evolving, dev tools have democratized the craft and new consoles are hitting the market from three different hardware makers.
Riccitiello insists that he leaves the company in great shape in the hands of Probst, but what a time to let go of the steering wheel.
Your title has an assumption that I think has been at the root of many problems: "Grand." EA only seemed to want to do big. They got rid of a lot of smaller/midsize titles in favor of the big hits. But, when a title fell short (MoH:Warfighter), they had a lot riding on that. And despite having fewer titles, management didn't seem to be interested in making sure they were *good*. Many so-so titles (TOR, SimCity, Warfighter, etc) have come out recently, and most people can name a half-dozen more.
As I've said, EA failed to ship a NBA title two years in a row. That's a giant pile of sunk costs without a penny of profit. One failure might happen, but then the eye of Sauron should be on all the leads to make sure you have *something* shippable next year. That didn't happen. Management should have taken notice after the first failure, yet whatever they did (or didn't do) led to an identical result.
Here's an idea I've proposed before, both internally as an EA employee (now voluntarily left), and externally: in addition to any grand plans, EA should be mining their back catalog. Midway, Namco, others regularly put out their back catalog on any and every platform. EA seems to want to bury their past, apart from a very few titles on gog.com. I would pay good money for M.U.L.E. and Archon on my consoles at home. Archon C64 exists. There is a C64 emulator for the Wii virtual channel. License the emulator, slap on a disk image. Sell it. Repeat for X360/PS3/Steam, etc, either as individual downloadable titles or a $20 impulse buy disc with 40+ games on it. Such a plan is not "grand." It won't make giant sums of money this quarter or next. But, it will pull in a solid stream of money and increase good will.
EA also could have taken some tiny internal teams and made downloadable games for X360/PS3/Wii this generation. Nothing that required a giant team, etc. But, a way to test out new technology -- Geometry Wars was originally particle engine test -- new IPs, new experiments. Once again, not "grand." But, a way to iterate, learn, and adapt quickly without committing $$$.
Disclaimer: I was hired by Pandemic Studios in 1998. EA bought Pandemic Studios in 2008. I left Pandemic (& EA) in Nov 2009, voluntarily.
From my (definitely armchair) perspective, the way entertainment has gone is bigger. In games and with movies, it seems the teams making them have increased tenfold as well as the budgets, for better or for worse. You rarely see any AAA movies made with less than a 100 million, with quite a few hitting 200-300 million. If a big budgeted game fails, the impact is huge, and immediate.(Kingdoms of Amalur is a great example) Quite a bit more seems to ride on the success of games, and new IP's seem a risky business when you have to face the wrath of Shareholders demanding quarterly profits.
Without asking to you to jab at EA enough to get in trouble, did your work environment change that much? I have a family friend who works for a studio acquired by EA in the early 2000's and from what she's told me not a whole lot changed and they get a fair amount of leeway with development, although it's been a year or two since I last spoke with her. The biggest restrictions as far as creative control lied with marketing, according to what she told me.
yeah the middle ground is all but dead right now. Still, new IP have to come from somewhere, and they should have given games like Mirror's Edge time to grow.
"that EA negotiated the $860 million deal for BioWare Pandemic was for a Star Wars MMO that was in development at BioWare."
"PopCap was the big buy in this area at $750 million in 2011, plus earn-outs that would bring the total price to $1.3 billion."
---
These are the types of purchases that can only happen when you get to play with other people's money. It's all very absurd. Why not just go to Vegas?
Under Riccitiello, EA comes across as a very unconfident, impatient and knee jerk reactive company. Maybe quit trying to rule all the spaces ASAP and just focus on making great games. Maybe that means you don't have horses racing in every genre in every platform out there.
I always wince when I see what EA pays for acquisitions. I can only assume that their gruesome M&A record means that EA needs a price premium when convincing entrepreneurs to sell their baby.
Craig, *every* entrepreneur will only sell their baby for a price premium. If no premium, then why not continue to run it on your own? EA's big M&A prices are frankly a product of size: say EA were to buy a company with $1m in earnings and pay a 10x multiple (EA currently trades at a 31x multiple of earnings). That's a $10m deal. Awesome. Owner gets $10m exit and EA has bought a nice small business. At EA' current multiple, that adds $31m to EA's market cap. Woohoo. EA is a $5b market cap company as of today, so you have just added .6% in a transaction which probably cost you half a million in legal fees, due diligence, integration, etc. to complete which really dilutes it down to .3%. Do a hundred of those (which would probably take a staff of 50 in the biz dev department to dig up, vet, pursue, close, etc.) and you have added a whopping 3%. This is why big companies have to swing for the fences. Not that EA didn't have an unreasonable number of strike outs but still...it is just impossible to move the needle in a company that size buying small shops no matter how great their games are.
"Riccitiello was typically looking in the right direction, moving where the industry was headed."
The core industry has been a car driving full speed towards a cliff for several years. It can clearly see the danger head but instead of turning away or hitting the brakes, it keeps driving straight ahead. Because it mistakenly believes someone or something will magically appear and build a bridge to cross before it plunges off the edge to its death.
So moving in the direction as the rest of the industry was not the right or advisable choice. Because the core industry has been moving in the opposite direction of the vast majority of it's existing audience, and its entire potential audience for 6 years. Riccitiello blindly followed the crowd because he didn't know the medium or the market well enough to understand he needed to turn away. Now he's the second AAA CEO to drive off the cliff. And I doubt he'll be the last.
"Let's buy a company that does something we've no idea how to do, then re-organize it to fit our own corporate structure that doesn't do that thing we bought it for."
I don't work in the industry but here is my view as a gamer.
TOR did not fail because of timing. The MMO space hasn't changed that much. The game failed because they released it before it was finished - as EA do on pretty much every game and is why I and many simply won't touch anything released by EA.
What EA did was finish the leveling side of TOR but the end-game was simply not ready - not even close. This would be fine if it took 6 months to reach level cap and they had time to get it sorted by time people reach max level but it took 2 weeks without rushing to level cap.
All of the excuses that are presented in this blog are not the core problem in my opinion. The key issue that EA gets wrong time and time again is releasing unfinished, rushed games.
TOR could have been such a huge success. EA one presumes should have had the funds to let them finish the game before releasing, but short-term greed wins out every time.
I believe that as well. Somewhere down the road EA simple believed as a core strategy that it would be better to leave a game half done and then offer the finish as a DLC later down the road. It became apparent to the consumer side with games from many of their developers that this was the case. It became so blatant that the PR where making the fact known that this is how they indeed intended to do business. From what I can tell the majority of consumers are fine with DLC, as it shows that the company will support the game well past it selling cycle. What they are not fine with is being fleeced. Having to buy the ending after they just put down their 60+ bucks. Having to buy 30 + dollar Premium packs just to get extra weapons, maps, or vehicles cheaper than buying them separately. That's a consumer destructive strategy.
Riccitiello was behind the 8 ball. Every acquisition was purchased at its peak hype and thus peak price.
It was like buying a house in 2006 or an Internet stock in 2000.
He put EA in much worse shape than it was 6 years ago. They have lost billions since then and aren't any better off. He spent too much chasing trends only to see the trends plateau or die out or to see talent leave. Te great ones skate to where the puck is going not to where it is.
Then the sloppy quality of their game releases only sealed their fate and ground their reputation into the ground.
Tor was too restrictive, the story was too naive, the market wasn't there, and the gameplay was 6 years old. In essence they had the right idea, build a mmo, but build it better. But Tor was frankly like playing Monopoly, boring as hell except this time it's star wars Monopoly. They had a winning formula, they chucked it out the window. Prior to the buyout they had great stories, interesting characters, balanced gameplay, complexity .. and then they became a corporate entity and failed miserably. You can't create significant worthwhile art by backpeddling the gameplay into meaningless garbage. MMO combat is not a mainstay interest, it never was for WoW, and thinking it was going to fill in nicely was a fools gambit. I told them this on their forums for 2 years, I was rebuffed by fanbois and now they pay with their pocketbooks. Shameful ignorance for a multi-billion dollar company.
They also really deserve their reward, they didn't deliver on a damn thing they said they would. They not only betrayed their fans, they lied to the new players as well. After 2 strikes, who will trust EA? I don't care what they deliver, heck you can look at their other games like BF3, milking that one into the ground also. Does it fix the the problems? No, but the machine making new content must go on!
EA is a shameful waste of resources and manpower. If they can't make ends meet delivering quality, then sink the boat, or go make gambling games but get the hell out of serious games.
The combat was different, the price point was much lower, the pvp was decent, the encounters weren't farm a batch of mob x, the terrain was at least a notch better, and the ability to actually explore terrain without being hemmed into a fake static mob scenario around every corner. GW2 breathed a little more, still I only played a month, so I don't call that a success. I think most players (assuming WoW converts?) are still under the illusion because of the much higher quality terrains, unlike other MMOs you could literally miss something .. and GW2 was laughably more interesting even with a completely corntoon theme. The stories were freaking atrocious in GW2, but they did the important grind portions much better than their competitors. They made wandering into a random cave seem significant, they made side quests seem relevant ~ because you choose them.
Still GW2 (assuming it's the biggest current mmo atm), is only the winner by being the least lame. MMOs don't work, not in their current state.
@Joshua Oreskovich
Then why aren't Rift, Tera, LOTRO all shutting down?
I think success in the context of the article is whether it made more money than it cost, not whether some guy named Joshua played it for longer than one month.
That's right, I'm just Joshua. I'm just the Joshua that has tried all those games. I'm just a Joshua who has spent most of his free time looking for the best game. MMOs are a miss.
I don't need a PhD to tell you they suck, I don't need votes, I haven't spent the last even 3+ years developing for a large game company or heck even an indi one. And maybe that's what allows me to see the problems and not hold my tongue.
I'm not arrogant Jay, I'm just a guy that has kept close watch. I was weened on AD&D almost before I had a bottle in my mouth. And I am anything besides impressed with the lack of comprehension this multi-billion dollar company has trying to grapple the basic tenants of good roleplaying.
I played Rift in beta ~ it was crappola, I could have told you it would fail. I saw Tera online with no connection to it's audience aside from marginally improved combat. Lotro hit the market pretty square with FTP as well as being pre Aoc/Warhammer fail. I played Lotro for 2 years, and I can tell you why they've held on and why they are slowly dieing. Lotro had casual end game and stayed fairly true to lore of Tolkien's world ~ That is why it still lives .. if it's dieing and I think that's debatable it's because of the deviation from that lore to create a mega stupid grind and continue to milk obscure lore instead of staying to their original deal.
I know what I am looking for also, and while it is tied to a mega industry that industry is quite expendable to achieve quality gaming. WoW succeeded because of commercialism and bringing enough high quality kitch art to keep the wheel churning, it's game was less irritating than it's previous competitors, but it's still far from the mark.
And watching copycat after copycat fail trying to get a piece of that market is a no brainer. Every single MMO since has ostracized the nerds, now much older nerds that wanted roleplay .. the ones who actually gave a damn if these games succeeded or failed.
Who has the inspiration to play these games? They're a shadowy impression of their roots, and they will continue to be second rate kitch art crappola until they start offering a more wholistic experience. Roleplay MMOs are a monolithic waste of quality game time, it's become a group solitaire social club.
Gw2, just happens to be the least lame. It has enough good change finally after how many hundreds of failures to improve on WoW to make it worth the permanent jump. It's still second rate existentialist garbage.
Guild Wars 2 probably sold a lot of copies but the lower level areas are deserted now. It is nowhere near the biggest MMO at the moment - that clearly is still WoW despite the declining subscriptions.
The whole no quests thing is nonsense. They just turned quests into hearts which largely indeed were kill x of this, they just didn't spell out that's what you were doing. There also seems to be no apparent link between hearts, just self contained quest sets with no rationale to do them other than to level. GW2 seriously lacks the draw most other games of it's type have and I can't completely put my finger on why but it just doesn't 'grab' you like a good games do when you are new to them. Haven't once looked at the clock and thought 'shit where did the last few hours go' while playing GW2.
Where the MMO trend is going wrong, in my opinion, is believing the whole 'game starts at max level' and then allowing it to take a week or less to get there with no fleshed out endgame. In WoW, sure the game is now all about max level content but its 8 years old - new games should be about the game and it needs to take months to reach max level - with stuff to do not just mindless grinding - then they should have time to get the end game ready.
I think the reason pretty much all MMO's since WoW have failed is because despite having better graphics and character models and new story and whatnot, the game systems are always terrible in comparison when this is really a key area for sustaining interest.
Having been there, I can say that EA's moves in new territories is not at all accompanied by an adaptation in its practices. Mobile is full of small teams that quickly ship simple, original, fun products with a lot of personality. The market seems to like this. EA went in with large teams, countless levels of hierarchy, partnerships that require more management and red tape, and a culture of tight control and an almost irrational suspicion of anything new.
I'm sure online is the same.
They once had a winning formula for shipping big license console games, and in fact this part of their business is still doing great. After all FIFA and NHL still come up with a quality games almost every year.
But apparently, they still think that the structures and practices that helped ship FIFA, James Bond, Harry Potter and the Sims will work just as great with products that are wildly different.
When you have a hammer for a head, every problem looks like a nail, right?
As I've said, EA failed to ship a NBA title two years in a row. That's a giant pile of sunk costs without a penny of profit. One failure might happen, but then the eye of Sauron should be on all the leads to make sure you have *something* shippable next year. That didn't happen. Management should have taken notice after the first failure, yet whatever they did (or didn't do) led to an identical result.
Here's an idea I've proposed before, both internally as an EA employee (now voluntarily left), and externally: in addition to any grand plans, EA should be mining their back catalog. Midway, Namco, others regularly put out their back catalog on any and every platform. EA seems to want to bury their past, apart from a very few titles on gog.com. I would pay good money for M.U.L.E. and Archon on my consoles at home. Archon C64 exists. There is a C64 emulator for the Wii virtual channel. License the emulator, slap on a disk image. Sell it. Repeat for X360/PS3/Steam, etc, either as individual downloadable titles or a $20 impulse buy disc with 40+ games on it. Such a plan is not "grand." It won't make giant sums of money this quarter or next. But, it will pull in a solid stream of money and increase good will.
EA also could have taken some tiny internal teams and made downloadable games for X360/PS3/Wii this generation. Nothing that required a giant team, etc. But, a way to test out new technology -- Geometry Wars was originally particle engine test -- new IPs, new experiments. Once again, not "grand." But, a way to iterate, learn, and adapt quickly without committing $$$.
Disclaimer: I was hired by Pandemic Studios in 1998. EA bought Pandemic Studios in 2008. I left Pandemic (& EA) in Nov 2009, voluntarily.
Without asking to you to jab at EA enough to get in trouble, did your work environment change that much? I have a family friend who works for a studio acquired by EA in the early 2000's and from what she's told me not a whole lot changed and they get a fair amount of leeway with development, although it's been a year or two since I last spoke with her. The biggest restrictions as far as creative control lied with marketing, according to what she told me.
"PopCap was the big buy in this area at $750 million in 2011, plus earn-outs that would bring the total price to $1.3 billion."
---
These are the types of purchases that can only happen when you get to play with other people's money. It's all very absurd. Why not just go to Vegas?
Under Riccitiello, EA comes across as a very unconfident, impatient and knee jerk reactive company. Maybe quit trying to rule all the spaces ASAP and just focus on making great games. Maybe that means you don't have horses racing in every genre in every platform out there.
The core industry has been a car driving full speed towards a cliff for several years. It can clearly see the danger head but instead of turning away or hitting the brakes, it keeps driving straight ahead. Because it mistakenly believes someone or something will magically appear and build a bridge to cross before it plunges off the edge to its death.
So moving in the direction as the rest of the industry was not the right or advisable choice. Because the core industry has been moving in the opposite direction of the vast majority of it's existing audience, and its entire potential audience for 6 years. Riccitiello blindly followed the crowd because he didn't know the medium or the market well enough to understand he needed to turn away. Now he's the second AAA CEO to drive off the cliff. And I doubt he'll be the last.
- EA's Strategy
TOR did not fail because of timing. The MMO space hasn't changed that much. The game failed because they released it before it was finished - as EA do on pretty much every game and is why I and many simply won't touch anything released by EA.
What EA did was finish the leveling side of TOR but the end-game was simply not ready - not even close. This would be fine if it took 6 months to reach level cap and they had time to get it sorted by time people reach max level but it took 2 weeks without rushing to level cap.
All of the excuses that are presented in this blog are not the core problem in my opinion. The key issue that EA gets wrong time and time again is releasing unfinished, rushed games.
TOR could have been such a huge success. EA one presumes should have had the funds to let them finish the game before releasing, but short-term greed wins out every time.
It was like buying a house in 2006 or an Internet stock in 2000.
He put EA in much worse shape than it was 6 years ago. They have lost billions since then and aren't any better off. He spent too much chasing trends only to see the trends plateau or die out or to see talent leave. Te great ones skate to where the puck is going not to where it is.
Then the sloppy quality of their game releases only sealed their fate and ground their reputation into the ground.
They also really deserve their reward, they didn't deliver on a damn thing they said they would. They not only betrayed their fans, they lied to the new players as well. After 2 strikes, who will trust EA? I don't care what they deliver, heck you can look at their other games like BF3, milking that one into the ground also. Does it fix the the problems? No, but the machine making new content must go on!
EA is a shameful waste of resources and manpower. If they can't make ends meet delivering quality, then sink the boat, or go make gambling games but get the hell out of serious games.
Still GW2 (assuming it's the biggest current mmo atm), is only the winner by being the least lame. MMOs don't work, not in their current state.
Then why aren't Rift, Tera, LOTRO all shutting down?
I think success in the context of the article is whether it made more money than it cost, not whether some guy named Joshua played it for longer than one month.
I don't need a PhD to tell you they suck, I don't need votes, I haven't spent the last even 3+ years developing for a large game company or heck even an indi one. And maybe that's what allows me to see the problems and not hold my tongue.
I'm not arrogant Jay, I'm just a guy that has kept close watch. I was weened on AD&D almost before I had a bottle in my mouth. And I am anything besides impressed with the lack of comprehension this multi-billion dollar company has trying to grapple the basic tenants of good roleplaying.
I played Rift in beta ~ it was crappola, I could have told you it would fail. I saw Tera online with no connection to it's audience aside from marginally improved combat. Lotro hit the market pretty square with FTP as well as being pre Aoc/Warhammer fail. I played Lotro for 2 years, and I can tell you why they've held on and why they are slowly dieing. Lotro had casual end game and stayed fairly true to lore of Tolkien's world ~ That is why it still lives .. if it's dieing and I think that's debatable it's because of the deviation from that lore to create a mega stupid grind and continue to milk obscure lore instead of staying to their original deal.
I know what I am looking for also, and while it is tied to a mega industry that industry is quite expendable to achieve quality gaming. WoW succeeded because of commercialism and bringing enough high quality kitch art to keep the wheel churning, it's game was less irritating than it's previous competitors, but it's still far from the mark.
And watching copycat after copycat fail trying to get a piece of that market is a no brainer. Every single MMO since has ostracized the nerds, now much older nerds that wanted roleplay .. the ones who actually gave a damn if these games succeeded or failed.
Who has the inspiration to play these games? They're a shadowy impression of their roots, and they will continue to be second rate kitch art crappola until they start offering a more wholistic experience. Roleplay MMOs are a monolithic waste of quality game time, it's become a group solitaire social club.
Gw2, just happens to be the least lame. It has enough good change finally after how many hundreds of failures to improve on WoW to make it worth the permanent jump. It's still second rate existentialist garbage.
The whole no quests thing is nonsense. They just turned quests into hearts which largely indeed were kill x of this, they just didn't spell out that's what you were doing. There also seems to be no apparent link between hearts, just self contained quest sets with no rationale to do them other than to level. GW2 seriously lacks the draw most other games of it's type have and I can't completely put my finger on why but it just doesn't 'grab' you like a good games do when you are new to them. Haven't once looked at the clock and thought 'shit where did the last few hours go' while playing GW2.
Where the MMO trend is going wrong, in my opinion, is believing the whole 'game starts at max level' and then allowing it to take a week or less to get there with no fleshed out endgame. In WoW, sure the game is now all about max level content but its 8 years old - new games should be about the game and it needs to take months to reach max level - with stuff to do not just mindless grinding - then they should have time to get the end game ready.
I think the reason pretty much all MMO's since WoW have failed is because despite having better graphics and character models and new story and whatnot, the game systems are always terrible in comparison when this is really a key area for sustaining interest.
I'm sure online is the same.
They once had a winning formula for shipping big license console games, and in fact this part of their business is still doing great. After all FIFA and NHL still come up with a quality games almost every year.
But apparently, they still think that the structures and practices that helped ship FIFA, James Bond, Harry Potter and the Sims will work just as great with products that are wildly different.
When you have a hammer for a head, every problem looks like a nail, right?